Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University presents:
 
Nida Ghouse in conversation with Brooke Holmes
"Curator as Cat’s Whisker”
Tuesday, March 22, 2022 @5pm ET
Online Event [register here]

A cat’s whisker is a fine metal wire shaped in a curve. In a non-electric radio set, as the antenna picks up signal from the ether, the wire is dragged around the surface of a crystal until it detects a point through which the current can flow. At the turn of the twentieth century when the galena crystal radio came into popular use, the physical principles by which the semiconductor worked were not properly understood, even assumed by some to be bordering on the mystical. Thinking through this operation, as one informed by a series of internal connections, this talk asks what it means for curatorial practice to be true to material.
 
Nida Ghouse is visiting lecturer at the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton University and co-artistic director of the Singapore Biennale 2022. She received the 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation curatorial fellowship for the exhibition Shifting Center, upcoming at EMPAC in 2023. At Haus der Kulturen der Welt, she curated A Slightly Curving Place (2020) in the framework of An Archaeology of Sound, a collaborative project responding to the acoustic archaeologist Umashankar Manthravadi. The project travels to Alserkal Arts Foundation over 2021–22 and encompasses Coming to Know, a discourse program with Brooke Holmes; A Supplementary Country Called Cinema, a film program with Surabhi Sharma; and An Archaeology of Listening, a publication series with Archive Books.
 
Brooke Holmes teaches at Princeton University, where she previously directed the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities and served as the PI on the Postclassicisms project from 2012-2020.  Her research and teaching range widely over the history of the body and nature, Greek literature and philosophy, classical reception, and critical theory, including critical studies of antiquity.